Establishing a repeatable, pro-active performance improvement process

In Chapter 1, Setting Targets and Identifying Problem Areas, we learned about the potential negative impacts of poor business intelligence system performance. It is great to have knowledge, metrics, and tools to resolve performance issues. However, a behavior that I have seen all too often is that these are usually leveraged reactively after an issue has had enough of an impact on the business that it is formally raised and brought to the attention of developers and administrators. This is not a good situation to be in for reasons described in the following points:

• Changing production systems is non-trivial, it requires careful change management, and can involve more than just deploying new technical artifacts. One example is that users may need training and documentation may need to be updated if there are significant report or dataset level changes.
• There may be short deadlines for the business to resolve...